Bookslut

July 2009

Enemies, Public and Private

It's going to be a short one this time, kids. There's a hell of a lot going
on right now during this Bad Summer, and present circumstances require that
I cross country once more, venturing into that breadbasket of America, the strange
and inglorious middle where just about anything can happen, believe it or not.

Of course, you'll all be safely ensconced either within the vile trappings
of a backyard barbecue (watch your uncle miss that wobbling football pass and
plunge face-first into a fire pit) or, if you're lucky, in the cool, climate-controlled
sanctuary of a movie theater.

Sure, you could lower yourself down among the proletariat to consume the vile,
malicious humor of Bruno or The Hangover (though if the latter
had leaned more heavily towards the characteristics of what is basically a skewed
missing-persons case, it might have fared better in the long run). You could
glory in the geekvana that is Harry Potter or the phaser fights of Star
Trek. If you're real lucky, you might even snag a viewing of Kathryn Bigelow's
stellar bomb-squad nail biter The Hurt Locker.

But I know you. You'll be spending your holiday with Johnny Boy.

Fortunately, Depp's latest venture doesn't have anything for me to warn against,
so far. No tentacle-faced sea captains. No bad CGI. No murderous barbers (not
that murderous barbers are altogether bad but I hate singing and Tim Burton,
so Sweeney Todd turns me off). No weird historical adaptations, no sunglasses
and facial tics, no coke-addled sweaty palms. For an even more appropriate take
on the family's interest in crime fiction, it's worth ferreting out his big
brother Daniel's recent crime novel, Loser's Town.

But back in the world of celluloid heroes, it looks like not only did Johnny
get his gun but somebody finally realized that Depp's charm could be menacing
instead of merely insane, and cast him as John Dillinger in Public Enemies.
If there's anybody who could potentially not screw this up, it's Michael Mann.

I'll leave it to you to assess the movie for yourself, but regardless of what
you think of the film adaptation, I would encourage the reading of its source
material: Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of
the FBI 1933-34 by Bryan Burroughs, who thankfully keeps his prose a lot
more clipped than his title.

I'm not sure how this slipped under my radar when it came out, but upon hearing
that Mann was adapting the book, I ferreted an original first out of my killer
local used bookstore early this year and I was hooked.

This month, I kept flashing back to the book as I was planning my journeys
to the various homelands that shaped my present self. Growing up in the Midwest,
there was always very little sense that your environs once contained as much
bloodshed, violence and bitter revenge as the blistering cities of Chicago,
New York or Los Angeles, places you could only dream of stalking the streets
someday. Sure, there was Jesse James and a few vaguely admiring comments from
dim-witted high school teachers about the massacre inflicted on Lawrence, Kansas
by the outlaw William Quantrill and his gang of thugs and murderers in 1863,
but there was very little savoir faire attached to any of the history.

But even a cursory read of Burroughs' prophetic narrative reveals a wealth
of criminal history right in one's path at any time. Eventually, my path will
take me near Oklahoma City, where Machine Gun Kelly kidnapped Charles Urschel
in July of 1933, holding him for ransom in Texas. At some point, I may pass
through Tulsa County, where a dim-witted mother named Ma Barker would raise
four sons, all of whom came to nasty ends -- not by the alleged criminal aptitude
of their mother -- but the machinations of Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, the real mastermind
whose ignominious career brought him in the orbit of Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd,
Bonnie and Clyde and even Charles Manson before his long run ended in a mysterious
suicide in 1979. Less than an hour from one of my familial destinations is Joplin,
Missouri, where Clyde Barrow and his gang, among them his gun moll Bonnie Parker,
engaged the local lawmen in a vicious gunfight in March of 1933 that killed
Detective Harry McGinnis and fatally wounded Constable J.W. Harryman.

History is everywhere if you look hard enough.

Later this summer I'll be near Sioux Falls, where Dillinger pulled off a brazen
daylight heist of the Security National Bank and Trust with Baby Face Nelson
on March 6, 1934, an event that Burroughs describes with both journalistic precision
and narrative propulsion. It's to his credit that the author was dedicated enough
to wade through stacks of newly released FBI files as well as do his own original
research, particularly once you find out Burroughs started the project by pitching
it as an HBO miniseries. While its historical accuracy feels dead on, there's
no doubting its cinematic flavor, either. Keep in mind, too, that this is just
one minor event in a string of career robberies, not even the mass gunfight
that happened later at the Little Bohemia Lodge.

As Dillinger and Van Meter shoved the bank president toward the vault door,
Nelson seemed to be working himself into a frenzy. He pointed his gun at one
frightened employee after another.

"If you want to get killed, just make some move!" he announced. "If you want
to get killed, just make some move!"

Within minutes policemen began to arrive. A traffic cop, Homer Powers, was
the first to run up. Tommy Carroll met him with his submachine gun, and within
moments Powers was standing on the sidewalk, hands above his head. The police
chief, M.W. Parsons, and a detective arrived next. They were disarmed and
joined Powers on the sidewalk. A crowd of townspeople began gathering, drawn
by the alarm and the spectacle of three policemen standing with their arms
raised.

In the lobby, Nelson was working himself up into a lather. Just then a motorcycle
cop named Hale Keith pulled up beside the bank. Spotting him through a window,
Nelson leaped a low railing, scrambling atop a loan officer's desk, and let
loose a deafening burst of gunfire through a plate-glass window. Women screamed
as Keith fell, stuck by four bullets. "I got one! I got one!" Nelson cried.

As Dillinger and Van Meter finished in the vault, the crowd outside was still
growing. People were hanging out of second-story windows, watching Tommy Carroll
pace up and down in the street, his gun trained on the policemen he had taken
hostage. A sheriff and several deputies headed onto rooftops, hoping to pick
off one of the robbers as they tried to escape. Inside, Dillinger and Van
Meter were finishing up. Just as the first Dillinger Gang had done in Racine,
they grabbed a bank manager and four tellers and herded them out onto the
sidewalk to the car. As they left, Nelson shot out the bank's front window.

Scattered gunshots ran out as the gang loaded the bank manager, Leo Olson,
and the tellers onto the Packard's running boards. The car had just begun
to move when a patrolman fired a shot into its radiator. Steam began to rise
from the hood. The car stopped, and the hostages jumped off. One of the women
began to run.

"Come back here!" one of the robbers shouted. A minute later, the hostages
back on the running boards, the Packard again moved forward slowly through
city streets, south towards the frozen prairie at the edge of town. Once they
hit Route 77, the main road south, Dillinger reminded the others to toss roofing
nails behind them. With the Packard's engine coughing and sputtering, he could
see it was only a matter of time before a posse caught up with them.

If the book has any minor flaw, it's in Burroughs' dichotomy between his obvious
fascination with the period and its larger-than-life characters, and his propensity
to dismiss all but Dillinger as hopeless, incompetent criminals of the most
pathetic breed. He does this with Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, though it's
fair to say that the pair of redneck outlaws have become largely over-romanticized
in latter decades by their depiction in the 1967 film starring Faye Dunaway
and Warren Beatty. (As an aside, it would appear that Bonnie and Clyde didn't
make the final cut of Mann's film, although it's hard to criticize a cast that
includes Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, Giovanni Ribisi as Alvin Karpis, and
the long-lost Stephen Dorff as the aforementioned Homer Van Meter. For further
reading about Parker & Barrow, I would recommend Jeff Guinn's new biography
Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, although
it tends to be more fact-laden and less enlivened than Burroughs' account).

Where Burroughs succeeds is not just in the details but in the big picture,
as the author takes an idea long-held by scholars studying the period and fleshes
it out into a real and relevant story. These criminals, as Burroughs writes,
were, "…the bogeymen for the children who have become known as The Greatest
Generation," and their subsequent appearance in books and films has mythologized
them for history's sake. What few laymen ever realize, and Burroughs is dead-on
in using as his thesis, is that Hoover invented the mythology. The romance
attached to men like Dillinger, Nelson or Machine Gun Kelly belies a career
built on murder, theft, skullduggery and betrayal.

But here's the funny thing. While Hoover often fabricated the folklore that
made these outlaws heroes famous in middle America, all he really had to do
was put their mugs on the Ten Most Wanted List. It was, as usual, the American
people that did the rest. You have to give it up for oral tradition, even in
this somewhat modern world. All it took was for Hoover to craft a narrative
that featured his square-jawed agents (among them Melvin Purvis, who left the
bureau the year after Dillinger was killed and later shot himself in the head)
and braced them against a fiction that made out Bonnie and Clyde as renegade
lovers, Dillinger as a desperado of the highest order, or Baby Face Nelson as,
well, pretty much the crazed killer he was. Before long, John Dillinger could
be found chuckling to himself in a movie theater, marveling as his own heroic
villainy was being sold to him on the screen.

Hoover, meanwhile, went on to coalesce a combination of money, power and influence
whose shock and awe swept over the arc of American history for the next forty
years, and if you believe some people, far beyond.

Sometimes our enemies are more public than we think.

Clayton Moore wonders if his fingerprints are still on file. He talks about
the bad old days at claywriting.blogspot.com.